Children back with their parents

Lugging little backpacks, smiling immigrant children were scooped up into their parents’ arms yesterday as the Trump Administration scrambled to meet a courtordered deadline to reunite dozens of youngsters forcibly separated from their families at the border.

In Grand Rapids, Michigan, two boys and a girl who had been in temporary foster care were reunited with their Honduran fathers at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement centre about three months after they were split up.

The three fathers were “just holding them and hugging them and telling them that everything was fine and that they were never going to be separated again,” said immigration lawyer Abril Valdes.

One of the fathers, Ever Reyes Mejia, walked out of the ICE centre carrying his beaming son.

The boy was secured in a booster seat, and father and son were driven away. Lawyers said the fathers were too distraught to speak to the news media.

The Justice Department said more than 50 children under age 5 could be back in the arms of their parents.

It was the largest single effort to date to undo the effects of US President Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance policy of separating families who try to slip across the Mexican border into the US.

The Administration faces a second, bigger deadline — July 26 — to reunite perhaps 2000 older children. —AP